Ph.03 Helena Almeida
Regular price €25,00Imprensa Nacional, 2023. Second edition. Softcover, 136 pp., b/w and color illustrated 170 x 240 mm. Photographs by Helena Almeida. text by Delfim Sardo (English / Portuguese).
Helena Almeida, whose work never assembled into anything like a saga, always developed brief narratives driven by a body - her own. Sometimes that body makes use of objects, things that are a part of the body's presence in space, or that combine with it and define it, such as stools, chairs, dresses, gloves, boxes. At other times, that body, more sparsely in the past, more frequently in the more recent works - lives together with another body, the body of her lifelong companion , artist and architect Artur Rosa. Helena Almeida's body is by far the most important element in her work, she is the character in her photographic images and her body's metamorphoses are her subject, now displaying herself to the camera, now hidden in masses of dark shadow, now the passage of time is visible in her body's transformations, now irony intrudes upon a seemingly tragic, sometimes even painful situation.
Helena Almeida's work occupies a very important position in post-WWII European art, not strictly in conceptual terms, but also in terms of the aesthetic parameters out of which she developed her work, and finally, in the ethical and political consequences that arise from her presence before us, as a female body that tells itself. — Delfim Sardo
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